Get rid of Zionism – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News

the claim that Israel faced an existential threat in 1967 was a propaganda lie. It would have been possible to unravel the complicated situation caused by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, but Israel and the United States decided to exploit the Egyptian mistake.Today, these things can be discussed in academic discourse. But political discourse, aided by the intelligentsia of that period, is exempt from questions – even about those thousands of graves from the 1973 Yom Kippur War.Moreover, the politicians and the intellectuals claimed that Israel, as a “victim of aggression,” had the right to alter its borders. But the main aggressor in that narrative was Egypt, and it got back all its land, up to the last grain of sand, in the peace treaty that followed the 1973 war. The legal argument was shelved.There were also military arguments about “strategic borders,” and those were nonsense, too: No Israel Defense Forces general, either from that General Staff or those that followed, really believed in them, because the Yom Kippur War dealt Israel a harsh blow despite “defensible borders.” This truth also applies on the Golan Heights, to this very day.So we are left with the West Bank, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to lead us with his dual rationale: This is the land of our forefathers, and also, Hamas will attack Ben-Gurion Airport. There is no connection between these two arguments. As a rule, dual arguments serve as props to bolster each others weakness. But the mixture of strategy and messianism explains the power Israeli politics has to drug its subjects.The “Land of Israel” is a phantasm. Withdrawing from “parts of it” is presented as a “concession” even by supporters of the move. But the only concession we needed to make, even back in 1967, was giving up the messianic claim that this is our land, from the Bible, and therefore we have a right to it.